The Oldie May issue 413

The Old Un’s Notes With the Platinum Jubilee upon us, it’s time to look forward to the 70th anniversary of the Young Elizabethan, too.

Founded in 1948 as Collins Magazine for Boys & Girls, it was renamed the Young Elizabethan to celebrate the Queen’s Coronation. In 1958, it changed its name again, to the Elizabethan – also the name of Westminster School’s magazine, named in honour of its founder, Elizabeth I. Interested oldies should seek out an old copy, for proof of quite how dramatic a transformation our Queen’s reign has seen in the young.

The magazine epitomised the aspirations of 1950s childhood. It was called ‘the magazine to grow up with’.

‘I think you should make the puzzles harder,’ wrote one pious boy to the letters page. ‘I can do them much too easily.’

Readers of the Young Elizabethan (owned by John Grigg, the jovial Tory monarchist, who later wrote an incendiary article about Her Majesty, was thumped in the street and renounced his

title of Lord Altrincham) were curious by nature. They collected fossils, and requested articles on Mozart, astronomy or ‘old ruins and caves and the legends connected with them’. They loved books. They pleaded for pen friends and a club they could join.

And, however studious, they found Molesworth and St Custard’s – created by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – absolutely hilarious.

They entered daunting competitions – ‘Design a science lab’ or ‘Devise a way of keeping flies off a horse with a docked tail’. Prizes included a visit to the zoo, or to Peter

Scott’s bird sanctuary. A challenge to ‘Write a poem in the manner of William Blake’s Tyger’ was won by young Jonathan Fenby, later to edit the Observer, with a poem about cricket: ‘Batsman, batsman, full of gall / As you face the bouncing ball.’

Another winning poet was budding playwright Alan Ayckbourn, 15, from Haileybury. William Feaver, future biographer of Lucian Freud, was writing book reviews for the magazine at 12.

Young Elizabethans ended up doing rather well. But, sadly, there was no market for the magazine after 1973.

Among this month’s contributors Allegra Huston (p22) wrote Love Child: A Memoir of Family Lost and Found and A Stolen Summer, a novel. She is codirector of Imaginative Storm Writing Workshops. She lives in Taos, New Mexico.

Huon Mallalieu (p26) is The Oldie’s exhibitions correspondent and Country Life’s art-market correspondent. He is author of How to Buy Pictures and The Illustrated History of Antiques.

Michael Arditti (p29) has written 12 acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His novel Easter won the Waterstones Mardi Gras Award. He was the theatre critic of the Sunday Express.

Molesworth the Elizabethan

Jenny Bardwell (p32) is semi-retired from the BBC. She volunteers at a bookshop and at Somerset House. She runs a City Lit volunteering course for retirees and is involved with amateur dramatics.

Slap-up feed at the Beano

RASP! TWANG! WALLOP! Iain McLaughlin has just written a real chortlefest, The Unofficial History of the Beano (White Owl, £19.99).

One of the many joys of the great comic is its exclamations.

McLaughlin writes, ‘A comic isn’t complete without the funny sound effects that drag you into that crazy cartoon world. D C Thomson’s hand lettering was the best in the business at making the effects fit perfectly with the artwork.

‘The artists were called on to draw anything and everything for spot illustrations: slap-up feeds were very popular in post-Second World War austerity Britain.’

And what could be a better feed than bangers and mash (pictured), the staple diet of all great comic characters?

Prince Philip’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey was a grand do, but one disappointment was the absence, even with numerous politicians there, of hobgoblins.

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